Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II...
NationalityLebanese
ProfessionScientist
CountryLebanon
mother humility years
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism
mother never-trust journalist
Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
mother odds law
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
serendipity luck
...maximize the serendipity around you.
weakness
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
callous designed people provide social turn
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
functions home human run textbook understood victims view
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
noticed
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
drop except local
I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
accept false knowledge limits people
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
experience looking next recognize solace time
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
I have never had personal debt and never will.
delay large members united
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
happiness humanity replace trade
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.